by Gary Gibson
Then a sense of desperate terror, the blood flowing in yet another suicide attempt. But the release of death never came. Feeling faint, she swayed in front of the ruined figure crouching before her, its lips obstinately unmoving even as it spoke within her. This experience was like eating a Book, but a thousand times more powerful, more full of sensations and information. How could so much information be contained in one dissolving molecular package? And then she remembered the creature’s words spoken when it had still appeared human. It can’t, it doesn’t.
‘I, I don’t . . .’ she faltered. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘You do. Accept the information. You know now. Before the Book fades, reach into Susan’s memories. All of her is in there. Go to the Citadel.’
I can’t, she thought. I won’t go back. There must be other places we could shelter from the radiation. Every nightmare I’ve suffered for ten years is in there.
The Book was indeed fading. Awareness of the rough soil beneath her hands was becoming more vivid; she could hear the everyday sounds of the camp around her. She gagged as an ocean of knowledge poured into her mind, so vast and so deep she feared she might drown in the flood of memories and accumulated knowledge.
She was back completely in the world again. Dawn light criss-crossed the interior of their cage with stripes of dusty brilliance. It took several moments for her to realize that Elias was not there – simply no longer in the cage with her. She reached out, touched Vincent’s still form, and somehow knew, in that instant, that he was finally, truly dead. His cold skin felt like marble under her fingertips.
Elias had left her a note on a folded smartsheet lying by Vincent’s shoulder, its pixels glowing faintly in the morning light. Desperately, she willed Vincent to wake up, his head hanging loosely in her arms.
She finally let the tears come, because there was no one there to hear her, and for a little while she blamed Elias for Vincent’s death, and wished vengeance upon him.
After a while, she unfolded the smartsheet and smoothed out the creases. The words shone out at her brightly from the sheet’s tiny paper screen.
Vincent died 1 hr after you ate Book. Got him to tell me some things first. Told me more about radiation. All fits together, some, anyway. Sorry about Vincent, was nice guy. We’ll know if we won if we’re all alive next week. Elias.
She let the smartsheet fall to the ground. Vincent had been in a coma the last time she was conscious of him. Had he woken up since? How else could Vincent have told Elias anything? And then he’d died? The horrible thought that Elias had speeded his death occurred to her, and she examined Vincent’s body for any signs of injuries she hadn’t noticed already.
Finding none, she realized he had just got sicker and died. She could now see where Elias had scrabbled into the hard dirt by one corner of the cage, digging with a broken-off section of plank, and somehow doing it all without drawing attention to himself. The cool air beyond beckoned her. She wanted to be out, away from Vincent’s corpse, out amongst the living, whatever kind of creature they were. But what would she do, once she was out there? Follow Elias wherever he had gone? She wouldn’t kid herself that she possessed that kind of resourcefulness.
She wiped Elias’s message from its screen, just in case the Grid was back online. To her delight, on hitting update, she was presented with a packet that had arrived through the singularity within only the past few hours. The smartsheet had automatically updated itself meanwhile, and they had not even realized.
A plan of action began forming in her mind. But, while thinking it through, she noticed a new message alert was flashing in one corner of the smartsheet.
The message was addressed to Vincent. She’d assumed the smartsheet had belonged to Elias, but on closer examination the ’sheet was good quality, not merely designed to be used for five minutes and then thrown away. Vincent had personalized it.
The message itself was from somebody called Eddie Gabarra. The name rang a bell – some friend of Vincent’s?
She read the message, swearing occasionally at what it said. This was a day for revelations. She could hear movement outside, and wondered how long it would take their captors to realize one of them had got away. She decided not to worry about how they might react to that discovery. Two days. Elias was right: they only had two days, then half the existing species on Kasper – including the one that had built this cage – would very likely be wiped out.
She ran a Grid search for the information she needed, drawing the locations from Susan’s memories. Normally, the memories gleaned from a Book slipped away within hours, but after eating only the one Book, she experienced an unprecedented clarity of recall, the information it contained taking up residence in her long-term memory with no prompting. That made it hard to dismiss the dialogue she’d experienced with the – whatever it was that called itself Sam Vaughn.
Papers and studies regarding the Kaspians, information derived from those clandestine searches undertaken far from the secluded icefields of the Citadel, researchers and soldiers being dropped down in uninhabited areas under cover of night, to retrieve what they could without danger of accidental intervention. Samples of their language, too. Some of this body of knowledge, she was aware, had come from Susan herself.
So there they were: samples of the language, place names – a fountain of information. What was the name they used for their lost city of the North? Baul. Nobody was sure if they meant ‘the Citadel’, but that didn’t seem unlikely.
She then came across software that translated human language into the sigils and symbols of the Kaspian language, based on samples found and some extrapolation. She heard further movement, then rapid chittering and clicking just beyond the cage. They’ve found Elias’s escape route, she thought. Now they’re going to come in here. Then what happens?
More chittering, shadows flashing through the spears of light criss-crossing the cage, as the Kaspians moved about.
She was as ready as she’d ever be, when the door was yanked open and a long, fur-covered face with pale scarlet eyes looked in at her. She stood up, her legs feeling weak and shaky, and held the smartsheet, with its bright pixellated screen facing towards the Kaspian, the single word Baul blazing on it in each of the three main Kaspian tongues.
It studied the ’sheet for several long seconds, then let loose with a long sequence of chittering sounds. It stepped aside, and she saw the one Elias thought might be their leader, standing watching her with wide, blank eyes.
Eighteen
Sam Roy
Sam pushed his way out of his snowy cell, after waiting for another twenty minutes or so. Ernst would be out looking for him. He had the manpower, and the technology, to sweep the mountains thoroughly, although that would take time. Sam was unarmed and, for the moment, alone.
There! A bright silver gleam passing between two great jagged peaks. It shot closer, coming from the opposite direction to New Coventry. Soon it resolved itself into a shuttle, before dropping down to the snow with a roar. Matthew jumped out, followed by three others. Sam had met none of them before, had never even known the names of most of Matthew’s co-conspirators. They stared at him now with a mixture of awe and horror. He was, after all, the brother of Ernst Vaughn, the man who had ruled their community vigorously since long before any of them were born. He was also, by the tenets of their upbringing, the Devil made flesh.
To Sam, Trencher’s mind seemed to come shining through the landscape like an invisible sun – still unconscious, but powerfully alive.
‘Luke,’ said Matthew, breaking the brief silence. ‘Fetch Sam some clothes. We’re getting out of here now.’ Luke nodded, came forward and took one of Sam’s arms, helping him to hobble aboard the shuttle. Sam pretended not to notice the revulsion on the boy’s face.
The heat inside the shuttle hit Sam like a wave of fire. He stumbled and almost collapsed, but Luke helped him back upright. ‘Are you all right?’ asked Luke, his eyes full of alarm, as the others followed them on board.
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‘Too . . . too hot,’ said Sam, his throat dryer than he ever remembered. He could not comprehend this sensation of being not cold. His ruined skin seemed to contract around his body painfully in response. However, he was healing rapidly. ‘Get him through to the bay,’ ordered Matthew as the shuttle door clicked shut. Sam still reeled from the heat, but supporting hands helped him through to the rear of the craft. The bay section of the shuttle had been converted into a makeshift hospital. Two fold-down cots had been bolted to the floor and one of them was already in use. They tried to coax him onto the other one, but Sam shrugged them off and, with what seemed to be the last of his strength, staggered over to study the frail, thin figure that occupied the other cot.
Trencher. It had been so long – more than a few lifetimes. Sam peered down at the old man, and saw a face not unlike his own, lined but unscarred.
Trencher’s eyes opened and Sam, looking into them, seemed to see great whorls of stars in their unknowable depths. Where were you really, Sam wondered, while you were hooked up in that coffin? Did you live in one place and yet another, both at the same time like I did? Or did you just dream the years away there, in your steel and plastic coffin?
‘No.’ Trencher spoke, his voice thin and fragile. ‘I talked with them too.’ Just a few words, but a universe of meaning within them.
‘Sam,’ it was Matthew, ‘what now?’
‘Exactly what I told you. You must head for the Citadel, but we need to do something else first.’
Roke
One of the Shai prisoners had escaped during the night, and Roke wondered if the Monster had been aware this would happen. Another of them had died. When he had sent men to scout out the forest in the wake of the burning craft, he could not forewarn them about what they might find, for fear of coming under suspicion for being so well informed about the apparently unpredictable. He had his future within the Emperor’s court to think of.
He had ordered the scouts to bring back anyone, or anything, they found alive, for interrogation. The scouts had looked uncertain at that. Why should there be anyone to find within the forest, even after that vast object had crashed through the air above them? The place was far from the traditional routes of the northern tribes, and filled with nothing but ghosts and forest beasts.
Roke had fretted, unable to totally trust in the Monster, fearful he had cast in his lot with demons who meant the Emperor ill. Maybe he should simply fulfil the task Xan had given him: survey this unknown territory and report back. But, of course, the dramatic descent of the flying ship would not go unreported . . . Roke had pulled his ears tight about his head in frustration.
There were mutterings amongst his ordinary soldiers as well, about how Roke appeared to be attempting to communicate with the monsters they had captured. And now one of them seemed to have vanished into the night, managing that without disturbing the guards. That it might be prowling vengefully through the forest even now chilled Roke to the bone. He wished to be gone from this area as soon as possible.
But then something remarkable had happened.
This last remaining Shai did not try to speak. Instead it held up some strange glowing sheet. And the familiar word for the city of Baul was emblazoned upon its surface, in letters clear and readable, yet somehow composed of light.
Now in Roke’s quarters, the alien smoothed the glowing sheet out upon a slab of wood, then guided Roke’s long fingers to it, so that one of his thick black digits pressed against it. As if in response, letters in Roke’s own language appeared.
Roke understood immediately. As he touched one panel and then another, more letters appeared. The alien guided his hand until he understood how to organize the letters into coherent words. As he wrote My Name is Roke, other, unfamiliar sigils appeared on the glowing sheet next the sentence he had written. These must be the creature’s own language, he guessed.
The alien turned the sheet around to face it. I am Kim, she wrote. One of us has died. A sentence appeared below her rapidly tapping fingers. The syntax was wrong, the order of words confusing, but Roke could understand, or make reasonable guesses.
He realized he was communicating with a creature from another world. It was a dizzying sensation that seemed to chase all his former doubts away.
You are all in terrible danger, the creature wrote.
Fire from the sky, Roke wrote in reply. The creature twitched, as if it hadn’t realized he knew.
Ursu
At first he’d been wary of this tribe, remembering previous bad experiences. But he soon discarded the wide blanket of his instinctive prejudice. Not all of the tribes reacted the same.
This tribe was called the Deshugevvit, like all tribal names a compound of the names of the spirits inhabiting the great stone markers that defined their eternal trail across the northern wastelands. The Deshugevvit were dying out, it seemed, but not from disease, starvation or warfare; they were losing their younger members to the ports and cities of the south, as they married into city-bound families, or joined city guilds, or became part of the new breed of merchant-tribes who facilitated trade between the city-states of the newly founded empire lying south of the Great Northern Sea.
So when he found them, or rather they found him – huddled by one of the great stone pillars lost in this empty white wilderness, with the great mountain range to the north the only thing to distinguish sky from land – they had taken him in and fed him.
They were mostly old folk, their numbers clearly dwindling. They seemed polite, but extremely superstitious, rituals seeming to fill much of their time between eating and sleeping. Time seemed to stretch out into vast eternities amid the deep white coldness surrounding them, and it wasn’t hard for Ursu to imagine these folk might think this was all there was to the world.
Ahead, the mountains drew slowly closer: great forbidding crags that stabbed upwards into a pale sky.
The Deshugevvit were not the only people who journeyed so close to the mountains of the far north. The land had curved back in until for a few days Ursu had found himself following a stretch of coastline. In the few hamlets encountered along the way, flood-endangered towns that had once perched on rocky prominences, Ursu had heard many stories about explorers and travellers meeting their doom in these icy wastes, while attempting to find a sea passage north that simply wasn’t there.
But he had heard other tales, that there was now indeed a land passage somewhere ahead that hadn’t existed before; caused by the melting away of the ice, affording a way through to the most distant points north.
For the tribe itself, there was no end of portents, signs and demons to persuade them that the end of the world must be coming. If he hadn’t known better, Ursu might have joined them in their prayers. He had seen something silvery flash overhead only the previous night, as if some great bird with skin like water-dazzle nested there in the frozen mountains.
But the fire from the sky would be coming all too soon.
The next day, the tribe informed him that they had reached the very last standing stone before the great mountain peaks of the north. They had held a council, believing he might have some great purpose beyond the mountains, and decided that Ursu should scout ahead, with some of their younger tribesfolk, to see if the way north was now clear.
Vaughn
Vaughn assumed mindform and hovered on the edge of a humanly inaccessible crag, staring towards the peaks to the north.
He could be tricked, but never defeated. That just wasn’t in the cards for him. The wind sliced through where his body should have been, while his real flesh twitched in its chair some miles distant. He watched as a shuttle flew low across the landscape, and wondered if the Station authorities had managed to get their orbital observation satellites up and running again. Disabling them had been hard enough work in the first place. Effecting it a second time would attract too much unwanted attention, and they wouldn’t be able to cover up another failure.
Which meant there was a fair chance for anybody observin
g to spot the shuttles suddenly appearing, in the region of the Teive Mountains, as they slipped from under the protective blanket of the shield generators. It was a necessary risk, however, if he was going to locate Murray or, more importantly, Trencher. He wondered if this was how it had been for other great leaders throughout Earth’s history; that moment when random circumstance forced strategy to deviate from its original plan, to evolve and – for better or worse – become something else.
But ultimately it was a matter of expediency, of cutting one’s losses. They might lose their anonymity, the secrecy of their existence, but would speed that much more quickly to absolute victory. But now his son had disappeared. Was he being tested by God, he wondered? The awful possibility that Matthew was insane enough to turn against him a second time seemed unbelievable, but who else would have had the audacity to steal Trencher from under his nose? A tide of anger overwhelmed him. Matthew would have to be punished.
Someone was calling to him. Vaughn opened his eyes, as the distant crag faded. Someone was standing over him.
‘Wake up, sir, wake up. We’ve managed to locate one of them. It’s Murray.’
There were six of them in all: two women and four men, all mid-twenties, all trusted. People whom Ernst Vaughn felt sure would not turn renegade. He supplied them with arms and a shuttle, and sent them off to find Elias Murray.
Tracking the Goblin that brought Murray to Kasper had not been difficult. It meant flying over occasional small settlements populated by tribal Kaspians, who might wonder for a few days, but that hardly mattered. They’d all be gone in a few days anyway, ushered into history by the inexorable will of God. The shuttle flew on.
The forest stretched for dozens of kilometres beyond the point where the Goblin had crashed. At one point they flew high above some kind of Kaspian military camp, which was obviously investigating the crash site. They took pictures of this, and reported back over the radio. They also activated onboard detection systems that could pick up traces of body heat.